Mark Dunn
Mark Dunn is a playwright, novelist and non-fiction author. A 35-year veteran of writing for the stage, Mark is the author of 15 full-length plays now available for licensing through Concord Theatricals. His most popular plays – Belles, Five Tellers Dancing in the Rain, Belles: The Reunion and A Delightful Quarantine – have together received over 250 productions throughout the world.
Most of Mark’s work for page and stage is set in the American southland of his youth. He has a strong interest in telling the stories of southern women and enjoys writing plays that live and resonate on community, college and high school stages. He enjoys the advantages of working within the amateur theater market, which allow him to offer up vehicles with larger casts and more strongly ensemble-driven pieces than are often reflected in the more character-restrictive professional theater market.
Mark is author of the award-winning novel Ella Minnow Pea, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in print in 2021, and which has long been a mainstay with book groups and middle and high school English classes throughout North America and the U.K. Author of a number of other novels, Mark has also penned several works of non-fiction: Zounds! A Browser’s Dictionary of Interjections; Quizzing America: Television Game Shows and Popular Culture in the 1950s; and most recently, Texas People’s Court: The Fascinating World of the Texas Justice of the Peace.
During the pandemic, Mark made his most recent full-length play, The Puzzle with the Piazza, available for royalty-free streaming productions and readings around the United States and Canada as a thank-you for the many years of community theater support of his work. His plays Belles and its sequel, Belles: The Reunion, because of their compartmentalized staging (both plays are comprised of telephone calls between sisters), helped to carve out a new way to present theater via "Zoom-friendly" streaming.
A Memphis native (who grew up behind Graceland), Mark now makes his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico after sojourns in Austin, Texas; New York City; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. He lives in the “Land of Enchantment” with his wife Mary and their three mischievous boy-cats.